New Delhi: Notwithstanding high fuel prices, financial headwinds for airlines and bizarre incidents in the last 12 months, Indian aviation sector witnessed the 51st straight month of double-digit air traffic growth indicating high demand potential in the Indian air travel market. This, coupled with infrastructure constraints at larger airports, could lead to a potential uptick in air fares on trunk routes in 2019, experts said.
From an infrastructure perspective, while the larger airports remain constrained, the Centre’s flagship regional connectivity scheme UDAN – or Ude Desh ka Aam Nagrik – has resulted in addition of airports in smaller towns and far-reaching areas such as Northeast India, Jammu & Kashmir, etc taking the total airport count in the country beyond 100.
However, routes from these smaller airports have not contributed significantly to the passenger traffic growth. In the first nine months of 2018, a total of 6.25 lakh passengers were carried on UDAN routes, compared with 10.28 crore domestic passengers that India witnessed during the same period.
“It was a good start to the scheme and it definitely helped in improving infrastructure at many of our smaller cities by getting the airports in place. At the end of the day, these are smaller routes and they can’t be a large part of the market in any case. These are things that will grow over a period of time from a passenger point of view in terms of impacting the overall market. Going ahead, hopefully we will see more flights on these routes which could have a positive impact on passenger traffic,” Sharat Dhall, COO (B2C) at online ticketing aggregator Yatra.com told The Indian Express.
01/01/19 Pranav Mukul/Indian Express
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From an infrastructure perspective, while the larger airports remain constrained, the Centre’s flagship regional connectivity scheme UDAN – or Ude Desh ka Aam Nagrik – has resulted in addition of airports in smaller towns and far-reaching areas such as Northeast India, Jammu & Kashmir, etc taking the total airport count in the country beyond 100.
However, routes from these smaller airports have not contributed significantly to the passenger traffic growth. In the first nine months of 2018, a total of 6.25 lakh passengers were carried on UDAN routes, compared with 10.28 crore domestic passengers that India witnessed during the same period.
“It was a good start to the scheme and it definitely helped in improving infrastructure at many of our smaller cities by getting the airports in place. At the end of the day, these are smaller routes and they can’t be a large part of the market in any case. These are things that will grow over a period of time from a passenger point of view in terms of impacting the overall market. Going ahead, hopefully we will see more flights on these routes which could have a positive impact on passenger traffic,” Sharat Dhall, COO (B2C) at online ticketing aggregator Yatra.com told The Indian Express.
01/01/19 Pranav Mukul/Indian Express
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